A Cradle of Waves
How I survived a ferry across the Irish Sea
A summer evening, but only just — it was the last day of August. At the port in Dublin harbor, a screeching orchestra of gulls provided discordant accompaniment to the comings and goings of the port.
The ferry‚ “Jonathan Swift”, swallowed its load of passengers and their vehicles in the blink of an eye. It was a huge catamaran, a high-speed ferry which halved the time it used to take to get from Dublin in Ireland to Holyhead in Wales across the Irish Sea. On this day it would take about 1 hour and 45 minutes.
Because it was such a short trip, no cabins or beds were required. The passengers — humanity in all shapes, sizes, colors, and ages — began to fill the vast, single room within the boat. This one room fulfilled every purpose of the day’s journey with a lounge, bar and buffet service, hospital, sleeping quarters, and a concert venue.
But all of the hustling and bustling and bubbling life of the passengers froze into stillness as the voice of the ferry’s commander, Captain O’Leary, squeaked from the overhead speakers. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard the Jonathan Swift for today’s trip to Holyhead.” This simple welcoming message was announced with a great deal of authority in his voice — an authority that is available, for some unknown reason, only to captains of big boats, aircraft pilots, and publicans at closing time.
But from that point onwards, the captain’s voice seemed to lose its power and authority, turning into a soft whisper as he began to mumble his apologies. “I have several announcements to make, there are two good and one not-so-good message. Firstly, the not-so-good. The latest weather forecast tells us that today’s journey will take us into some areas of very heavy winds. I’m afraid it’s going to get a little rough out there.”
This message had been very carefully phrased, in typical Irish fashion, as an understatement. When the captain said, “a little rough out there,” what he actually meant was, “This trip is going to get totally chaotic!”
Certain passengers, those aware of the Irish tendency towards understatement, and those who had made this trip in bad weather before looked alarmed. Knees began to tremble. Little hairs on the back of their necks began to stiffen. All attention was now on the speakers; not one sound was heard throughout the passenger lounge.
Captain O’Leary continued in a tone that seemed a little more optimistic and positive, “And now for the good news. Instead of an expected delay of 2 hours before departure, we will be taking to sea in about 15 minutes.”
The second part of the good news was followed immediately in a very authoritative manner, “There are far more lifeboats on this ferry than on the Titanic.”
This authoritative news had now to be digested by the passengers, but there was little time. No sooner had the word ‘Titanic’ begun to fade from the vibrating speakers than a trio of young ladies burst into the passenger lounge. They were quite obviously crew members, by their burgundy uniforms, grey trousers, and black aprons. But a closer look was enough to notice that these were not ship’s officers or staff of high rank. Their uniforms were a collection of spots and blemishes, and their faces were a strange off-color. Those faces, though obviously young, showed signs of abuse and aging beyond their years.
Passengers with a knowledge of such things could tell something from the look of these young ladies. They knew that the previous journey of the Jonathan Swift, from Wales to Ireland, had been a rough, stormy crossing too. Our trio of young ladies had probably just had their first experiences with sea-sickness. And they were about to have their next experience very soon.
The three faces began to take on strange shapes and creases until an effect had settled on them, which somehow resembled a smile. I could imagine the words in the ferry’s training manual — “Smile at the passengers to put them at ease”. But I have the distinct impression that this trio had little to smile about. And my fears were at once confirmed. In one practiced movement, they each held a large, clear plastic bag above their heads. Inside each of these big plastic bags, was a lot of white paper.
I feared the worst as to what all of this meant. Then it dawned on me that we, the passengers, were participating in the distribution of sick bags (or puke bags as they are better known). It was a very ominous sign for the trip ahead!
As the three young ladies got down to their work with the puke bag distribution, I took a seat at a table for three. Across from me sat John. I never actually learned his real name, but with ‘John’ you always have a better-than 85 percent chance of winning any Irish name quiz. This ‘John’ had a round, potato nose with a red, bulbous end. Clearly, it was due to his frequent enjoyment of the odd snifter of brandy. He had three streaks of hair on his head, which were obviously due to baldness, two on the right, and one left. Well partitioned, I thought.
I estimated him far beyond the pension age. His wife, Mary, took her seat next to him. Again, Mary was just the name I gave her, based on the same name-quiz odds I had used with John. Her bottle-blonde hair fell down over her magenta-colored T-shirt which had a slogan that read, “I’m the Greatest.” I glanced another look at John and agreed with the motto on Mary’s T-Shirt.
John and Mary greeted me in unison with the standard Irish greeting “It’s a nice day, isn’t it?” I had the perfect answer to hand, and it really hit the nail on the head, “It’s a really nice day,” I said.
The puke bag distribution team catapulted a 10-puke pack onto our table with a skilled throw. John and Mary smiled at me. It was a friendly, harmless smile, and I returned it in the nicest possible way. But before the smile had even begun to melt, Mary reached out with two, wide-open arms and, whoosh, she scooped up eight of the puke bags. Mary was no sea-dog, I thought with a grimace.
In the most mathematically correct and gentlemanly way, John and I shared the leftovers. Then, with her eight puke-bags clasped securely to her breast, Mary ‘I’m the Greatest’ disappeared behind the table and stretched out on the seating bench. I never saw her again until we arrived in Wales. By the sickly yellow color of her face, the puke bags had been put to good use.
Moments later, the ‘Jonathan Swift’ took to sea. From what I could see, we had hardly cleared Dublin harbor before the ferry began to do its best imitation of a roller-coaster ride. It was my first experience of totally random movement — we went through every imaginable variation of tilt, roll, rotation, and swing.
If the ferry’s movements could have been recorded and replayed through one of those fairground rides, they would have had a sure hit on their hands. Although handling out puke-bags on the roller coaster when the need arose could have been problematic.
Here’s a question: Why do young kids, especially young teenagers, go to so much trouble to get sick? Put them onto the most horrible ride at the fairground, you know — like the ones that leave you hanging upside down for 20 minutes — and they’ll talk about how great it was for days. But I can guarantee you that not one of them was going to enjoy this little piece of real-time “reality” on the ‘Jonathan Swift’ today.
Our table was now minus Mary since she had removed to the seating bench, where she was making odd sounds and intermittently, jerky movements. We were about 15 steps from the buffet service. “A great convenience,” I had thought when I had first taken my seat. John tried to make eye contact, but his eyes were going down and off to the left while mine were going up and rolling back behind my eyelids. We tried to coordinate our eyes with the wild gyrations of the ferry, but it was no use.
“Well, I’ll give it a go,” John said suddenly, giving a quick nod of his head to indicate the buffet service. Up he hopped with a grand display of movements that looked to me like the steps to a teenage dance-craze. Still, he managed to end up on the three-man buffet queue.
John’s return could have been a professional re-enactment of the scene in the TV cult film “Dinner for One”. This show is traditionally shown all over the world on New Year’s Eve. Remember the part where James the butler, totally pissed out of his brain, trips over the head of the tiger rug after serving Miss Sophie her wine. That was my John coming back to our table, across the wildly swaying floor of the lounge.
But unlike James the butler, John was not so lucky or skillful with the contents of his tray. His bowl of “Soup with Toast” did actually make it to our table. But both slices of toast had taken a detour and landed on a young lady’s bosom. Some of the soup remained in the bowl, though not much. Most of it was now either on John’s jacket or floating around in the tray. John quickly devoured the two or three spoonfuls from the bowl, while it was still hot, and seemed fully satisfied.
Having observed this procedure from beginning to end, I didn’t really want to try it myself. So I just tried my best to ignore the growing pangs of hunger I was now experiencing. Fairly soon, those pangs had turned into pains. I must admit my tummy has never been accustomed to waiting for meals, and the battle for control of the situation was very short-lived.
Now, my physique is not much like James, the butler, or John either for that matter. So my incoming flight to the buffet probably looked more like a dancing-bear act, but without the little ballet tutu. Luckily nobody seemed to notice. After making it safely to the buffet railing and getting something substantial to hang onto, I checked out the menu. I decided on “Salmon with Chips”. This sounded much safer and easier to handle than “Soup with Toast”.
I gave my order to the team of gourmet chefs behind the servery counter. “We haven’t decided yet,” they called to me in unison. This was not the response I was expecting. At first, I thought it meant that they were saving the salmon and/or the chips for themselves or favored members of the crew. And the passengers — dare I call them guests — would need to make do with “Soup and Toast”.
They must have seen from my confused look that I didn’t understand. “We don’t care too much for the cleaning work,” one of the team said, and pointed in disgust, with a turned-up nose, to a lumpy puddle of puke lying on the floor in front of the cash register.
“Aha,” I was beginning to understand.
It was clear that the crew had been hired as either cleaners or service providers — but not both. So the lines of demarcation had been clearly set, and no member of the highly talented food-service team was about to get dirty hands or callouses by lifting a mop and bucket.
Therefore, because the puke was blocking off access to the cash register, all service had, by absolute necessity, been suspended until someone turned up to clean up the mess. Someone other than the team behind the buffet counter, that meant. “Ask again in about half an hour, please,” was the polite response to my question about how I was to get my hot meal.
So the food was there, I had the money to pay for it, and I was hungry enough to want to pay for it, but an unforeseen bug in their system meant I was not going to get it. And that was that!
So with a repeat performance of my popular dancing-bear moves, I swanned back to our little table to find that I was now the sole survivor. John had made himself comfortable on the bench in front of Mary. To get more comfortable, he had taken off his shoes and tied them by the laces to the struts of our table, just in case a shoe-thief had stowed away on board and liked his moccasins. Mary’s face was close to the table, and she looked very unhappy with the ripe, cheesy smells that were now drifting her way. Her T-shirt with the slogan “I’m the Greatest” now seemed even more appropriate.
Mary wasn’t the only one to have noticed the sudden, downgraded change in the atmosphere near our table. One of the crew members must have caught a whiff of John’s feet, as he was passing. In response, a bright yellow, one-meter high “Emergency — Beware” safety-cone had been placed on the floor nearby. It might have started as a joke, but I think it may have saved more than one life that day.
Time passed — as it does — and soon my 30 minutes waiting time was up, plus an additional 15 minutes, which had been added “for technical reasons”. The buffet team had somehow resolved the earlier demarcation dispute, and hot meals were once again available.
But things had gone downhill during my forced waiting period. Everything on the menu had been crossed out except “Salmon with Chips”. But this item now had an extra note, “Salmon with Chips without Salmon”. It took me a few minutes with a pencil and the back of an envelope to solve this riddle as “Chips Only”. But the extended, more poetic version was the one which made it to the menu board.
The queue was not long — only two other solitary souls had also lost the battle for control of their hungry bellies like me. I thought about my upcoming meal and decided it was probably just as well that the salmon was now off the plate. The pathway back to my table was becoming more dangerous by the minute.
There was a growing profusion of yellow safety-cones dotting the floor in random patterns. They marked the spots where less experienced passengers had somehow forgotten the purpose of their puke-bags. Please recall, if you will, my previous descriptions of dancing bears, and you will again have a reasonable description of my little journey. Make that a return journey, because the chips had run out by the time I got there. So I didn’t need to worry about spilling my meal anyway.
But with all of this dancing about, I had noticed something out of the corner of my eye. Another storm was looming. Not another storm of strong winds and giant waves, no — something far more life-threatening. This new storm was in the shape of a human being — a youngish man with blond hair, aged about 30 years old and looking very, very pale. I noticed him climbing up onto a small stage on one side of the passenger lounge. There, he was secured in place with the help of a steward and his adjutant.
Also on the stage was an electronic keyboard on spindly metal legs — one of those home entertainment affairs, with 3,000 different instruments that all sound like a crummy toy organ. Poking out the top of the keyboard was a microphone. “Oh, no!”
It wasn’t enough that we poor, suffering passengers were being punished by mother nature with the hurricane blowing outside. Also, we were now going to have our few remaining senses smashed to pieces on the rocks of “shipboard entertainment”. What had we done to deserve this? Where were those girls with the extra puke bags?
We were about to be entertained. “Let the show begin,” I thought to myself.
This particular “entertainer” was obviously a newcomer to work in the open seas. He was clearly suffering from a severe case of sea-sickness, with nausea and cold sweats. Before climbing up onto the stage, he had been busy regurgitating everything he’d eaten over the past three days. His throat was almost certainly “a little sore,” to say the least.
The electronic keyboard had been bolted to the floor. Obviously, it had made this trip in bad weather before and survived. Our “entertainer” gripped the edge of the keyboard, and his arm muscles locked into place. It seemed possible that he could get by without being thrown straight off the stage by the wild movements of the jumping ferry. His knuckles turned white from the effort of gripping the keyboard. His feet were spread wide for the best possible balance, and his other spare arm waved around in the air like a cowboy riding a bull at a rodeo.
This was his “playing” hand, and the setup was obviously not going to work. I was beginning to think that we may, by sheer chance, be saved from our doom. But one of the ferry’s officers had come up with a plan — a stack of six, bulky cases of beer were brought in and stacked behind the keyboard. Our entertainer was strapped firmly down onto this solid stack in a sitting position. He was literally anchored down, with one hand now free to play the keyboard. His other hand still gripped the instrument and kept him in a general, upward position.
“I’m Kevin O’Malley,” he introduced himself and launched immediately into his endless list of popular, evergreen favorites: ‘O Sole Mio’ from Dean Martin; ‘Return to Sender’ by Elvis, Van Morrison’s ‘Brown Eyed Girl’, ‘Sugar-Sugar’ by the Archies; and a big “hello” from Frank Sinatra with ‘Strangers in the Night” and “My Way”.
It would be hard to imagine any audience who could have sat through this entire show. But we were in a terrible situation — we had absolutely nowhere to go! “Captive” is not the word — we were a compulsory audience! Eventually, the audience reached an unspoken compromise: we would clap loudly and sing along, provided that Kevin took regular breaks and didn’t sing or play too much.
Kevin’s securing ropes became loose from time-to-time. He was threatened with breaking away from his beer-box seat-anchor. Luckily, the faithful steward and adjutant always managed to appear in time to re-secure the ropes and keep Kevin and his keyboard battened to his alcoholic hatches.
After the above six songs, I could take no more, and I found a partial escape. I staggered over to the Duty-Free Shop, which was at the opposite end of the lounge from the stage. It was as far away from Kevin as it was possible to get without risking my life outside to the fury of the storm. I was in no rush to buy anything, so I gave everything a full, close-up inspection before putting it down again and moving on to the next object.
I wanted something strong and durable, which would be a life-long memento of my trip to Ireland. I wanted something meaningful, something I could proudly show-off to my friends when I got back to Germany. So I purchased a white golf ball with the ferry’s name printed on the side. For only 2.50 Euro. And to this very day, my Jonathan Swift golf ball sits proudly in the bottom drawer in my kitchen, ready to come out and play whenever anyone comes to visit.
No sooner was my lovely Jonathan Swift golf ball sitting safely in the bottom of my back-pack than the ship bucked madly.
I thought we’d hit an iceberg, but it may have been a giant wave. Maybe a tsunami? The boat jumped. I jumped. And everything on the shelves of the duty-free shop jumped too. Bottles of red wine, white wine, champagne, whiskey, vodka, perfume, and peanuts — everything went flying, then crashed to the floor and smashed to pieces. The duty-free shop smelled like a hooker’s handbag.
In an instant, as if from nowhere, a gang of three Irish truckers appeared and began to scrape up and collect the drips and puddles of the highly valuable fire-water. They must have been expecting this calamity because they were fully prepared with little flasks and funnels and everything. Maybe they could predict when a giant wave was going to hit?
It was like one of those prizes they show on TV game shows — someone has a shopping trolley, and they get to keep everything they can stuff into the trolley in 30 seconds. That’s what it was like with these truckers, except they weren’t being very fussy about what they collected. Everything they could scrape up went straight into their little flasks — Chanel-flavoured champagne, Campari-coated peanuts, Marlboros, and Nike aftershave. Whew!
They had several highly valuable, uninterrupted minutes to make their rich collection, while everyone else just stood around stunned. But in no time at all, unlike at the buffet counter earlier, the ferry’s “Clean-Team” arrived. Their first job was the instant eviction of the unofficial and unauthorized clean-up truckers.
It was a tense moment, and I was afraid there could be bloodshed — I was mainly concerned that it could be my own blood.
But the ferry’s team won the day, and the truckers went quietly off without another word, with their little flasks full and intact. And with huge grins on their faces. The duty-free shop was quickly locked up, and I was again trapped in the passenger lounge with Kevin O’Malley.
I was just wondering what his current song was and how I could get away, when the captain’s voice squawked over the loudspeakers, “Announcing our arrival in Holyhead in 15 minutes. Would all passengers traveling by car or bus, please proceed to their vehicles. We hope you enjoyed your trip.”
I had survived!
